Game of Thrones season 8: why should a novice try his luck

The last season of HBO's dramatic blockbuster Game of thrones April 14, and it might seem that everyoneSpeaks. No wonder: it's one of the biggest shows in the history of television, a sprawling tale of wars and dragons, alliances and intrigues. You may have never watched Game of thronesbut you live in the world that Game of thrones built.

But what if you have never watched the show? Is it worth diving now, at the dawn of the last season? Is Game of thrones Do you have anything to say about the world beyond its borders? And if you are not usually a fan of fantastic epics? And for those who would like to immerse themselves in the world of Westeros, how should they get started?

In an attempt to answer these questions (and others), two of Vox's residents Game of thrones the aficionados – Matt Yglesias, political and political correspondent, and Aja Romano, journalist specialized in culture – met Game of thrones novice Alissa Wilkinson to talk about the cultural importance of the series and its importance.

Alissa Wilkinson: I have never been a Game of thrones observer, but I've noticed some things about the series in the past seven seasons, simply because of my life in the world (although writing about culture does not hurt me). I know that there are dragons. I know a lot of people are fighting for power, and there is something called White Walkers, who are … coming soon? I've heard about the death and resurrection of Jon Snow, and I know that there has been at least one extremely bloody marriage.

In all honesty, I'm not a big fan of the fantastic genre. I love stories about power struggles and political factions, but once you cast castles and dragons, my eyes start to shine. When it first aired, I did not even pass the pilot.

However, now that the show is entering its last season, I think I should probably be paying attention. A phenomenon as important in itself as a cultural moment. On top of that, I realize now that there are so many more things happening on Game of thrones that I had previously credited. (Although, to be clear, it's not like I had disdain for the series – it's just that there is so much TV to look, it did not seem to fit my interests, and I live mostly movies for a living!)

But before I ask too a lot of questions about Game of thronestell me: what do you two, as people who are interested in culture and who are somehow stupid about ideas, find the show so compelling? Why should people who "do not like fantasy" think of looking at it anyway? Why is it important, beyond its status as a true cultural moment?

Matt Yglesias: Let me say that I came to Game of thrones in his first season, as a non-imaginary person who only agreed because I already had HBO and people were talking about it a lot. Now that I've read all the books, watched the series twice, thought a lot about the Targaryen dynasty's successful experience with religious tolerance, I'm still not doing it. read books about dragons and witchcraft.

It's a good thing about how Game of thrones is structured – the worlds you initially introduced contain relatively few mystical elements, and as these elements are introduced, human characters express great skepticism about them. It's a clever way to act in the fantasy genre, so that in the beginning you say to yourself, "This whole political plot is cool, but the magic wall is silly," and three years later, you have a lot to do The use of witchcraft by Bloodraven as a monitoring tool (do not ask, this is not even part of the show).

But here's the thing about Game of thrones this is for me really special, iconic and important: the scale.

Lychnidos / Wikimedia Commons

Game of thrones is tall. The sequence of generics revolves around a map, because the geography of the show is vast and unprecedented. And as the seasons progress, they still need to change the sequence of credits, because the size of the original map is large and spreads across two continents! – the show becomes even bigger. The cast is big, the battles are big, the wall is big, the dragons are big, everything is big. And you feel size.

I have never seen any other show achieve this kind of narrative-level expansion. Obviously, the literal scope of a Star Trek The show is bigger, with the speed of chain travel and everything else, but these shows always feel intimate in the same way as television. Regardless of the problem, the same small group of regular cast members are heading to the visiting team, and you know that newly introduced team members are red shirts that do not stay.

With Game of thrones, We never know. Apparently, the central characters die, those who are apparently peripheral become central, and other people come and go on multi-season arcs. A larger scale is a logical implication of many economic trends affecting the entertainment sector, so that shows in general have grown. But Game of thrones & # 39; Scale and reach are unprecedented in this respect. HBO released a defining moment in the first episode of Season 8: it just showed that two characters we were introduced to in the very first episode finally met. Season eight! Two of the main characters meet at last! It's the size of the show, and it's never been the same. It's worth it for everyone to see what's going on.

Aja Romano: To add all that Matt just said, I want to point out that one of the things that make that Game of thrones The important thing is that its scale is a common element of high fantasy. (The term "high fantasy" refers explicitly to fantasy in worlds that often resemble ours, but are not explicitly Earth.The term "low fantasy" is sometimes used to refer to an epic fantasy explicitly defined on Earth .)

The High Fantasy series is a huge, flourishing side of literary genre culture – but it has hardly ever been adapted to television so far. Game of thrones is unprecedented as a television series. His literary counterpart, George R.R. Martin's A song of ice and fire new series, is part of a series of epic and fantastic series whose content is devoted to a vast expanse of fictitious geographic space, which has spawned many volumes, taken years to write, which has never been completed, or All the foregoing.

The scale of Game of thrones is on par with works like Robert Jordan's Wheel of time, or J.R.R. Tolkien the Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillionor Ursula K. The Guin's Earthsea series, or N.K. Jemisin Heritage trilogy – works that all succeed partly because they bring us as readers to understand something of our own world through the fictional universe in front of us.

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As viewers, we usually draw this kind of science fiction lessons and since the advent of the classic Star Trekand probably The twilight zone and The outer limits before that. We are accustomed to seeing ourselves reflected in scenarios and universes that seem a little disjoint or foreign, a step ahead of ours.

But in writing A song of ice and fireMartin (or GRRM, as he is usually nicknamed) has very much based his literary universe on the dynastic clashes of medieval Britain and Europe. So when we look Game of thrones, we essentially get a history lesson in broad strokes, in the form of a simultaneous view through a magnifying glass of the sweep of civilization over the years of political intrigue and a closer look at the daily lives of people caught in those far distances. to reach the struggles. Between the dragons, Game of thrones gives us analogues for the Hadrian's wall, the wars of the roses, the crusades, even Zoroastrianism and the Christian monasteries.

These details all work to make Game of thrones to feel more relevant and meaningful than any other kind of speculative series that comes to mind. With other fantasy and sci-fi series, you are usually invested in drama because you love characters and enjoy the development of the world. With Game of thronesYou are invested for these reasons, yes, but also because, on one level, you recognize that this story echoes a serious saga of human conquest in the real world. It does not matter how familiar you are with the fantastic genre, or with the many details and subplots of the books that have never been part of the series, Game of thrones that issues as important as anything you watch on television. It's a bit like you're watching civilization unfold.

Alissa: So that's a big part of what I find most interesting about the series. This seems to have sparked much debate among commentators, fools and chroniclers about the politics of storytelling and how they fit (or not) into the real world. Which is logical for a great show on the development of civilization.

Does the show reflect geopolitics accurately? If so, how? If no, is it a good thing?

Mast: I always struggle with the concept of "precision" in this kind of context. When I was an economics columnist for Slate, I wrote a series of articles on the economics of George R.R. Martin's world with which I had a lot of fun. But I could never find a way to understand the impact of the prolonged summer and winter season on the economy, in part because it does not really explain how the crop life cycle is affected – and, well, sure, c-up story about dragons and ice monsters, so at some point, worrying about the basic grain biology gets a little out of the way.

But I think the books illustrate a lot of political themes and it continues well in the series.

This is partly because they give us characters who are fundamentally good people (like Ned and Robb Stark), but fundamentally ineffective as leaders, with terrible consequences for a very large number of people. of people. It presents a striking contrast with a show like The west wing (or the even more blatant version of this concept proposed by Dave), which basically states that if we could have well-intentioned people at the office, we would all be supported.

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Which, I suppose, is a long way of saying that, yes, I think Game of thrones is an unusually sophisticated representation of political conflict. Many of the plot-specific developments are a bit odd (especially when the series begins to go beyond the story told in the books), but I could also very well imagine using the series to illustrate a lot Max Weber's great ideas about the nature film of political authority, the ethics of accountability and the concept of politics as a discrete area of ​​action.

This season, two scenes with Tyrion and Varys is probably the most profound discussion about the sources of political legitimacy that you will find in the history of television.

Aja: This scene also illustrates one of the other great assets of this series, namely, that it is deeply aware of ways to change the story overnight because of the personality, flaws and whims of individuals. There are a number of secondary intrigues very involved in this show that essentially end in a character not confronting a conflict or a villain more important than their own pride, reckless loyalty, denial or delusions.

This happens, whether a character is explicitly vying for power, survival or something in between, and the result – aside from the occasional screams of millions of Game of thrones When your fans will "lose" the game, you can see an equivalent of the many notes of the story about some of the minor characters unfolding in front of you, en route to the larger lessons shaping the world. You can also see how the fate of these many "minor" characters sometimes triggers seismic events long after their death. Geopolitics may not fit the geopolitics of the Earth perfectly well, but interpersonal politics can not be sharper or smarter.

Game of thrones In the same vein, it is also wise to talk about the insulating nature of political battles and the struggle to create constructive and lasting social bonds in an environment often plagued by total savagery and mistrust. (One of the City Council's positions is literally that of Chief Gossip.) The show has several characters who are fully dedicated to using their political devices to survive everyone around them ("Chaos is a ladder", says One.) the only source of loyalty we can count on – and even these are often weak.

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However, despite the many seasons of the series, the story gradually breaks these ideas and reveals to us that the characters who are most likely to come out of this melee alive are those who choose to build bonds of trust. mutual respect and a common desire to work together for the greater good of humanity. (Insert here the allegory of climate change.) This is a subtly progressive trajectory for a show that has often seemed regressive – but it is the advantage of being able to watch a story of this size unfold over such a long period.

Alissa: OK then. If you would recommend to someone like me a few things to read or watch before the first of the last season – other than the series itself and the recaps of the full season – what would you suggest?

Mast: As you know, the gods of search engine optimization have commanded huge amounts of Game of thrones content on the Internet, so the challenge is not so much to find something to check as to sort the infinite stack.

The best place to start, of course, is the Vox cover!

There is a YouTube account called Alt Shift X that contains small video writers from virtually every Game of thrones The point of conspiracy under the sun that interests you, and his basic video of "Who Will Win the Game of Thrones?", Lasting nine minutes, goes straight to the point. I find that I can never follow everything that happens in the series or in the books. The Ice and Fire wiki is a valuable companion.

Aja: I admit to having often fallen into a YouTube rabbit terrier with Game of thrones, which means that I've watched a lot of Alt Shift X videos as well as the Civilization Ex story series, which is sometimes a bit dry, but ridiculously exhaustive and really interesting, if you really want to make sure that you get all the details of the show are passed over or left out.

Or, if you want a larger, newer and more colorful story lesson, I really like the story of Dariusz Sobotka, which is a great, well-done and fan-driven series that tells Game of thronesThe story told by various characters.

And although reading the series is not essential to reading, I really think that this is useful for understanding the A song of ice and fire/Game of thrones fandom and how it has evolved over the literal decades now, so I'm going to throw in a self-rec for the oral history of the most important Game of thrones fan theory (this has become reality!).

Alissa: One last question. In your mind, what is the best episode of the series, or the one you prefer, that everyone should watch?

Aja: It's ironic, because I've just compiled a guide to essential episodes that explicitly warns viewers against any attempt to pick a single episode as the entry point for the series as a whole. You really can not do it because there is too much to take – and the "best" episodes will probably not make sense for a newcomer!

HBO

But with these caveats, I think the highlight of season 2, "Blackwater," is about as close to an excellent multi-purpose program. Game of thrones the episode you can get: it's an episode of great battle, full of spectacle and shock, and a great showcase for one of the most popular characters in the series. It's a fan and a critical favorite, but it's also a nice, high-stakes deployment of everything the show produces better.

Mast: The boring literalist in me means that you should start with the first episode, because Game of thrones It's really not a show that gives you episodes of bottle, and the plot defies somehow the summary.

But I'm going to see "Baelor" towards the end of the first season, because it's the episode that showed me that I was not watching the show I thought I was watching.

Martin and the spectators sometimes tend to take their story as a bewildering direction, under the pretext of showing that they can be "dark" and "serious". But "Baelor" is actually a serious drama. Things do not unfold like classic intrigues, goodness is not always rewarded, and saying well is not enough to accomplish good things.

Game of thrones is a special television because it is irrefutable proof that high-scale fantasy can be brought to the small screen. As a series of books – and as a story – it's a lot less special in this respect. But "Baelor" captures something that is special and important on the underlying story, as well as demonstrate the know-how with which it was adapted for HBO.